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I'm working with a crappy Samsung phone as a camera, any advice on getting better photos of a small group of miniatures?

Getting lots of decent light is the main thing. Even crappy phone cameras are amazing compared to manual cameras. They do so many things automatically.

You can get simple LED light boxes for super cheap off amazon if you want to have a specific thing. Otherwise, if you have decent lamps for painting with, they would also do well.

There is a lot of info out there but here are the basics:

More light. Ideally diffuse. You can get a decent lightbox for like $50. At least last I checked. Or you can make your own with a cardboard box and some parchment paper. You want multiple lights to prevent angles. the diffusers make the light softer which also helps with that. Don’t use the flash straight on the mini, as that makes bad shadows.

Brace your phone/camera. In an ideal wold, use a delay timer to there is no jiggle from when you press the trigger to take the pic. You can get a tripod fitted to hold a phone, or just rest it on a box.

Depth of focus. You have a sweet spot where everthing is clear. This can be adjusted with f-stop and shutter speed etc. Your camera/phone probably does this automatically. Most noticeable when the autofocus decides to make the point of the sword clear, but the marine fuzzy. One thing you can do is not put the lense 2 inches from the mini. Take it further away and crop. You will loose a little resolution, but you are probably going to loose more when you save it as a jpeg to share on the web. Modern phones have megapixels to spare.

Clear background. You can go with a lightbox with a curved backdrop. Or just an old shirt or piece of paper. You an use fancy lighting or focus tricks to make all but the mini black/out of focus, but stick with simple for now.

Shotgun. You paying for film or working in a darkroom developing all the pictures you take? Didn’t think so. This is an old trick from even when they needed to do those things by professionals. Take a TON of pictures, choose the best.

Post production. You don’t need to do a lot here, but cropping your pic to highlight what you want is important. Kill all the whitespace surrounding the mini. Also, if doing a collage with multiple shots, they don’t need to all have the full subject. You want to showcase the face? Crop everything else. Also a little white balance goes a long way. Your photo program probably has a magic wand that can do it for you. I use a free program called Photoscape to do some work, but mostly just compositing pics together. You don’t need photoshop level programs.

When taking group shots of minis be sure they are all in the field of focus. This can be rough. You might be better with one wide group shot, and then focus a pic from the best angle of each one. Then stich them all together

Everything the above poster said. Also Warhammer put out this article which I've tried to use.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/JAcksor8/the-model-photograph/

I also have an old phone, but I've got better results using the Lightroom app than my default camera set up. The phone version is free and gives you a lot of options when editing photos.

My camera doesn't let me adjust the white balance manually, so I use a black background which really punches up the color.

If you use an iOS device, Adobe Lightroom is the bees knees. My photo taking game took a serious hit when I lost access to it some time ago. It's not cheap, but boy is it easy to take great picts with it.. Its selection of posprocessing tools is pretty good, I rarely had to open Photoshop after finishing up my tweaks on LR, and it has all the nerdy camera controls even pro photographers require..